Waxing Nostalgic...Sort Of

Thought I’d check in before compounding lab today. This afternoon I get to make a hydrocortisone ointment and rectal suppositories. Yay.

For some reason, I have had a certain bit of nostalgia stuck in my head for the past few days and I don’t know why. Back in sophomore year at Denison, Liz showed Marisa and me some music videos from a duo whose name I can’t remember (though the word “Fuzz” comes to mind). Their videos always depicted them as cartoon characters drawn in dramatically different styles. One guy looked almost exactly like the old Cartoon Network character Johnny Bravo. The other one (who did the vast majority of the singing) was essentially a disembodied head floating over the rest of his body. The head had a tendency to kind of bob from side to side to the beat of the music (most of which I also can’t remember). Marisa thought he was cute. I thought he was unbelievably creepy, and I never want to see him again. If you were to believe the music videos, the Johnny Bravo clone was German and the disembodied head dude was cockney British, but I looked the duo up on the Internet and discovered both guys were Canadian, much to Marisa’s dismay. I don’t know why I’ve been thinking about that recently, but I have, though I don’t have any particular desire to figure out what the hell the group’s name was.

In case anyone’s interested (particularly Marisa), I feel like I’m in serious need of a creativity pow-wow. These classes are murder on the imagination.

Big Announcement + Book Review

Sorry for the prolonged absence, but you know how it is. Or maybe you don’t. I don’t know. At any rate, we’ll start with the announcement. If you’re looking for the baseball stuff that’s been populating the site for the past two years, it now has a blog of its own, so feel free to head on over: tigersamateuranalysis.blogspot.com

As you may or may not know, last week was spring break for me. I spent the latter part of it reading Angels & Demons, mostly cuz I wanted to read it before the movie came out. In case you don’t know, it’s the lesser-known predecessor to The DaVinci Code. It’s a 700-page book that I managed to read in 3 days. And yes, the plot formula is almost identical to The DaVinci Code (note that I did not say the plot itself), even encompassing the same plot twists. Given the fact that Ewan McGregor is in the movie, I was particularly interested in whether I was correct about his character’s allegiances in the story. And I was. Pity. Still, while it is nowhere near being a literary masterpiece, it does make for an exciting read. However, if you look at the cast list on IMDB, you’ll notice that there are a bunch of major characters from the book who don’t appear to be in the movie. The trailer seemingly confirms this. And here is my one complaint about the movies: Tom Hanks is a fine actor, but he is grossly miscast in the part of Robert Langdon. Hugh Jackman or another action-movie-type guy would’ve been more appropriate (especially since Angels & Demons specifically states that the character is 40).

By the way, I just noticed the previous post and how either Firefox (I prefer IE6 to anything else, but if IE7 is my only option, I tend towards Firefox) or Office 2007 screwed with my formatting. I’ll try to fix it later.

Oscar Post-Mortems

Well, another Oscar season has come and gone, and I’m certainly glad that I saw Slumdog Millionaire when I did, cuz it’s been a long time since I’ve actually seen a Best Picture winner (I think Return of the King was the last one, and that was five years ago). One interesting sidenote is that I believe that Slumdog Millionaire is the only one of the five nominated films that ends on a high note (correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the other four all have downer endings). At any rate, critics are gonna complain that the ceremony was boring, as they always do, but we’ve been down that road before, and it’s really no use rehashing my old complaints about their complaints.

As far as Oscar Picks go, although we both improved on our scores from last year, my mom still edged me 11 to 9. For some reason, I was hesitant to choose The Dark Knight for ANY category, and it came back to bite me. At any rate, I got Picture, Actress, Animated Feature, Cinematography, Costume Design, Film Editing, Makeup, Original Song, and Adapted Screenplay. My mom got Picture, Supporting Actor, Animated Feature, Art Direction, Directing, Film Editing, Live Action Short Film, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, Visual Effects, and Original Screenplay.

In terms of hosting, Hugh Jackman was certainly a change of pace from all the comedians they’ve been using recently. He wasn’t the greatest, but he wasn’t the worst either. The musical numbers fell kind of flat, even though he is a pretty good singer. I did like the tongue-in-cheek complaints that the Academy won’t recognize comic book movies, which became less tongue-in-cheek when he proclaimed himself Wolverine (which I, in turn, had to explain to my parents).

Other observations:

·         The idea of presenting most of the awards in the same order they would occur in the production process was kind of neat. It looked like they had the Phantom of the Opera’s chandelier stored in the background, though.

·         Steve Martin is still not funny.

·         Upon further thought, it was probably only a matter of time before the Oscars featured a Bollywood dance number. “Jai Ho” was a good, catchy tune, though. One thing I don’t get is that there are a few lines of the song that are in Spanish. And why were the dancers accompanied by Japanese taiko drummers?

·         A lot of the “comedic” pairups just didn’t work. I already mentioned that Steve Martin is not funny. Neither is Ben Stiller, although I realize that he was trying to imitate Joaquin Phoenix (even though I never saw the Letterman interview). The funniest presenter was probably Will Smith (“Hugh must be backstage taking a nap or something”). Jack Black is normally funny, but his routine with Jennifer Aniston totally bombed. The Pineapple Express bit would also not have worked, but having Janusz Kaminski was so randomly bizarre that it was funny.

·         Another thing that I’m unsure of was what they did with the acting awards. Breaking with tradition, they had five former winners in each category laud the nominees one-by-one and then announced the winner. Not only did that deprive me of seeing the actors in clips from their respective films, it seemed to me like it took a lot more time.

·         Where were Javier Bardem and Daniel Day-Lewis?

·         It was a really good night for India and Japan.

·         The memorial tribute with Queen Latifah singing would’ve been okay if the cameraman would stop the continuous panning. I couldn’t read half the names.

·         There was a plea that I wanted to make that had absolutely nothing to do with movies or the Oscars, but I elected not to because it sounds really dirty out of context.

·         Usually, when someone wins a lifetime achievement Oscar or the Thalberg award or the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, they give a really long speech. Not Jerry Lewis. His acceptance speech was shorter than a lot of the regular winners.

·         Something I find somewhat amusing is that for once, the critics don’t agree on what worked and what didn’t. For instance, MSN did not like Hugh Jackman’s opening number, but Yahoo loved it.

·         Now for fashion. Looked good: Kate Winslet, Anne Hathaway, Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Tina Fey.

·         Looked bad: Miley Cyrus, Sophia Loren, Jessica Biel, Tilda Swinton.

·         Caveats: Angelina Jolie would’ve looked good except the giant ring and earrings she was wearing looked like cheap plastic. Marisa Tomei’s dress looked like it was designed by M.C. Escher. Meryl Streep looked very matronly.

·         The lady who won for the Best Documentary Short must’ve been sitting WAY in the back. Also, while they were reading off the winner of another award (don’t remember which), Frank Langella was caught on camera trying to find his seat.

BEST PICTURE

The Nominees Are:

• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
• Frost/Nixon
• Milk
• The Reader
• Slumdog Millionaire

Erin’s Pick: Slumdog Millionaire

My Mom’s Pick: Slumdog Millionaire

The Winner Last Year Was: No Country for Old Men

I just saw Slumdog Millionaire last night, so now I feel better picking it. It is a good movie, albeit one with some rather chaotic editing and it was a little hard to follow at times (I’d also recommend learning a little bit about Indian culture before watching it). On the other hand, right now the field is kinda wide open, or at least, moreso than it’s been in recent years.

BEST DIRECTOR

The Nominees Are:

• David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
• Ron Howard (Frost/Nixon)
• Gus Van Sant (Milk)
• Stephen Daldry (The Reader)
• Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire)

Erin’s Pick: Ron Howard (Frost/Nixon)

My Mom’s Pick: Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire)

The Winner Last Year Was: Joel & Ethan Cohen (No Country for Old Men)

This is one of those rare years where the Best Director nominees correlate exactly with the Best Picture nominees. However, there aren’t very many usual suspects in the mix. Ron Howard’s pretty much the only one. The cinema purists hate Ron Howard, but I don’t. I like a lot of the movies he’s directed, so I’m going for him here.